February 2011
20 posts
Creating Intelligent Cities that People Actually Want to Live in | Sustainable Cities Collective
Creating new Intelligent Cities is a grand plan that should be lauded but what if nobody wants to live in the cities you’ve created? Masdar, Curitiba, and Sogndo are all excellent examples of urban planners looking to create viable, sustainable environments but how do you plan for something as intangible as how a city ‘feels’? New cities are just like new businesses, they need the dynamic individuals, the early-adopters to drive innovation and create an attractive place to live. The cities with the strongest hold on people have long been those with a strong aesthetic dimension.
Think of the world’s global cities: Paris, Tokyo, London, New York, Sydney. These places provoke an emotional attachment, a nostalgic memory or an aesthetic for people around the world. It makes them desirable places to live, regardless of how high the cost of living is. It is these intangible qualities that make them global cities. In a world where talented individuals can pick their place to live, the best aren’t going to settle for generic urban landscapes and bland global tastes. The planned communities of tomorrow have to tailor themselves to the talent that big businesses’ will want to employ.
The same is also true of the urban areas that have existed for hundreds of years. Looking to the future is a healthy exercise. Not just because it provides us with a glimpse of work-in-progress technology. But also because it allows us to see the flaws in our current urban landscape and how these can best be remedied. Companies go bust. Cities rarely do.
People’s strengths are magnified in cities because ideas spread more easily in dense environments. Companies that are located near the geographic centre of their industry are more productive (Silicon Valley, Hollywood, etc) and both wages and skills grow faster. These cities thrive because they are host to quality ideas, not because they build new conference centres.
TEDTalks Sponsors | IBM Watson →
ted.com
Final Jeopardy! and the Future of Watson
The IBM team who designed Watson has achieved another milestone in the history of computer science. After the Jeopardy! challenge concludes, the team faces the task of developing real world solutions based on this technology.
The impact of a machine like Watson will be felt throughout business, government and society. Join the conversation to find out how the IBM team achieved this historic feat and chat live with IBM Watson Principal Investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow and CTO of IBM’s SOA Center for Excellence Kerrie Holley and Columbia University Professor of Clinical Medicine Dr. Herbert Chase, hosted by “Man v. Machine” author Stephen Baker.
To submit questions to the panel, sign on or join Twitter and use the hashtags #ibmwatson and #askwatson.
Tune in here for the webcast on Feb. 17 at 11:30 AM EST.
Brisbane's traffic the most stressful in Australia, says IBM study
BRISBANE traffic has been rated the most stressful in the country as a result of poor planning, aggressive drivers and an over-reliance on private cars.
An IBM study of 1556 drivers found 90 per cent of Brisbane motorists felt increasingly stressed by traffic compared with 81 per cent in Adelaide, 78 per cent in Melbourne and 74 per cent in Sydney.
Worldwide, the cities assessed as having the most painful commute, when combined with other factors, were Beijing and Mexico City, followed by Johannesburg, Moscow and New Delhi.
Brisbane ranked 13th, behind Sydney in 10th place.
IBM’s Smarter Transportation Industry expert John Hawkins said Brisbane drivers were in a “very stressed environment”.
“You’ve only got a few main arterials and you’ve got the Port of Brisbane and the airport located off one of them,” Mr Hawkins said.
Artful Intelligence: How “Smart Windows” and “Dynamic Glass” Can Save Energy
Source: Fast Company
A manufacturer of auto-tinting windows just nabbed another $10 million in financing. Is this the future of glass?
In the future, those glass windows on your office building might also be able to beat IBM’s Watson at Jeopardy. That’s how smart glass is getting.
Soladigm, manufacturers of auto-tinting “smart glass,” nabbed $10 million in equity financing, building off a recent $30 million round in December.
The notion of “smart glass” might at first seem a bit excessive. We demand intelligence from our partners, our friends, our colleagues, and lately our phones, but windows are not an entity that seem to necessitate smartness.
There’s a simple reason why smart, or “dynamic,” glass matters, though. It saves energy. When normal old “dumb” windows welcome in the noonday sun, buildings bake. But Soladigm’s electrochromics glass automatically adjusts its tint, helping regulate the temperature of a building and thereby reducing cooling (or heating) costs. The company claims its windows can reduce heating and cooling usage by a quarter. That’s one reason why the company was named a winner of GE’s Ecomagination challenge last year.
Soladigm has competitors, including the Saint-Gobain-backed Sage. And we recently looked at a company, Peer+, that manufactures a different kind of “smart glass”—windows that double as solar panels, generating electricity themselves. Imagine, then, if the two joined forces to make “genius glass” that both saves energy and generates it.
What Matters: What’s the biggest limit on city growth? (Hint: it's not steel or cement) →
whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com
Source: McKinsey
The world is in the throes of a sweeping population shift from the countryside to the city. Underpinning this transformation are the economies of scale that make concentrated urban centers more productive. This productivity improvement from urbanization has already delivered substantial economic growth and radically reduced poverty in countries such as China. The growth of cities has the potential for further growth and poverty reduction across many emerging markets.
However, we are now seeing cases where the growth rates of some large cities have begun to slow. In addition, the increased complexity of large size can overwhelm the ability to manage. When this happens, cities can become disastrous mixtures of slums and gridlock, raising the question of whether there is a maximum size for a workable city. The view of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) is that there is, in theory, no limit set by technology or infrastructure to how big or how fast cities can grow — but only if business and government leaders are able to manage the increased complexity that comes with bigger city size.
“Cities — not so-called failed states like Afghanistan and Somalia — are the true daily test of whether we can build a better future or are heading toward a dystopian nightmare.”
—Urban Growth for the New Millenium - Parag Khanna on Cities | The Ideas Economy
January 2011
48 posts
Indianapolis Must Reinvent Itself Again →
urbanophile.com
Source: The Urbanophile
Indianapolis has often been referred to as the “Diamond of the Rust Belt,” but its performance goes far beyond just being the best house on a bad block. Yet despite outperforming not just the Midwest, but America as a whole, long term challenges facing Marion County put the region at risk.
Few seem truly aware of how impressive metro Indy’s performance has been. Compared other large metros in the greater Midwest, Indy was #1 for population growth from 2000-2009, growing almost 14%, or close to 60% faster than the US as a whole. It also had positive net domestic migration – people moving in minus people moving out – of over 70,000 people while virtually every other Midwest metro was bleeding people. That’s like the entire population of Fishers packing it up from where ever they lived and moving to Indianapolis. People are voting with their feet in favor of Indianapolis.
Indy was also #1 in job growth, adding 19,000 jobs in that same period while the US as a whole lost them. It is #2 in GDP per capita, the basic measure of economic output per person, trailing only the Twin Cities. It even outranked Chicago, showing that far from the stereotypes of a low end economy, metro Indianapolis is in fact a high value economy.
But despite this great regional story, all is not rosy. In particular, Marion County as a whole is now starting to show signs of the urban struggles we typically associate with the inner city. For example, while its population has continued to grow, it has slowed to a crawl. It lost more than 50,000 people to migration in the last nine years. And it lost almost 60,000 jobs – a huge number. A report commissioned by Mayor Ballard early in his administration noted that three of the four largest townships in Marion County have declining assessed valuation. And the township school districts now largely trail those in the collar counties for graduation rates.
“There seems to be a popular belief that what it takes to create an industry cluster in bioscience or whatever is to pair research with commerce. That is, to find an academic institution doing cutting edge research, and connect it with venture capital and entrepreneurs to start companies to commercialize it. Soon enough, you have a “cluster” of businesses that takes off like a rocket. This is the perceived Silicon Valley model, and no company epitomizes it more than Google, which was started by two Stanford students to commercialize their graduate research. But is this true? There are many top flight research universities in this country, but few major startup clusters. When major research institutions fail to generate commercial spinoffs, this is often blamed on a lack of venture capital. But is that really the case, or is something else at work? Anyone interested in this matter simply must read AnnaLee Saxenian’s seminal book, “Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128“. A social scientist at UC Berkeley, Saxenian lived and worked in both Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 technology corridor. She wondered why Route 128, which started out with far more of a technology business and economic base than Silicon Valley, eventually lost ground to become a clear number two. She sees this resulting from the different social structures that exist in the various areas.”
—The Urbanophile » Replay: The Importance of Social Structures to Urban Success
China to make largest city in the world by combining 9 cities, 42 million people →
climateadaptation.tumblr.com
- 26 times the size of London
- 1/10th of China’s economy, growing at 4+%
- Highly industrialized section of China - lots of pollution
- Searching for a new name for the new city
- 29 rail lines, 3100 miles of track (NYC has 24 lines, and 800 miles of track)
- 42 million people -…
New York's quest to become 'the digital city'
Even the basic driving directions from New York City to IBM Research’s headquarters in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., make the whole thing sound like an arm-twisting inconvenience worthy of the difficulty that the city’s metro region has had in fostering Silicon Valley-style innovation: “Take the Sprain.”
That’d be the Sprain Brook Parkway, a squiggle of highway that reaches up from the northern end of the Bronx into the small towns of Westchester County, which turns into the Taconic Parkway a few minutes before the exit onto Kitchawan Road that leads to IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. It’s a broad structure of black glass fronted by a stone arch worthy of a midcentury ski resort. The surrounding environs: lawns, trees, rolling hills, more trees.
What’s inside: Probably the most impressive tech know-how that the New York region can boast. Most recently, researchers there built the computer capable of defeating the most successful “Jeopardy!” champions in a high-profile round of the answer-and-question game show. But that’s a story for a different day.
IBM Research feels a world away from Manhattan, though it’s only 40 miles from Wall Street—roughly the same distance from downtown San Francisco to Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. Changing that perception of distance is just one of the many tasks on the to-do list of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), an organization contracted by the office of Mayor Michael P. Bloomberg to promote growth in New York’s various business sectors. As 2011 has set in, it’s become clear that the NYCEDC’s resolution was tech, tech, and more tech—and not simply ambitions for attracting more engineering talent or building a decently healthy culture of start-ups; they are sweeping moves in the construction of something that can only be called “the digital city.”
Read more on CNET:
Hello, Wow what a gorgeous tumblr! If people like me submit something to you, will you all attribute the poster's name? Or is anonymous? Thank you, Michael
Michael: We give people the option to post anonymously or not. If someone does post, and has a Tumblr site, the post will link to their site, just as all tumblr reblogs do. Thanks and please share your thoughts and ideas on how we can build a planet of smarter cities.
why are these always on 24-7???
I was in the car with my ten year old sister when she presented me with this great question…
“why are those cross walk signs on all the time? its not like anyone is going to really be out walking around right now.”
I live in Michigan and its the middle of winter and there is a lot of snow on the ground. The sidewalks on all sides of the crosswalk weren’t shoveled and it was clear few people were going to be using that cross walk.
the question I raise is why is it that those cross walk signs have to be on all the time? wouldn’t it make more sense to just have them on when needed?
Maybe a simple solution could be that they only turn on when activated by butten or even sensor?
If action were taken on a federal level this kind of a change could help lower the whole nations electrical bill.
Canton, MI USA
the creation of the subdivision is a disaster to the environment. as urban sprawl happens, the question becomes more prevalent… why build an area where the people only live, but must commute for a long time to get to work, etc.. The typical family relies ever so much on their cars, and there is not as much neighbourhood interaction anymore. We should be building cities that actually have multiple purposes, not just housing.
“Companies and civic agencies need to develop innovative partnerships with city leaders, partnerships that leverage a city’s data to make better decisions and address the greater good.”
—How To Save America’s Cities With Data Analytics - Forbes.com
“Whenever the City builds new bicycle infrastructure on a stretch of road there is an increase of 20% in the number of cyclists and 10% fewer cars.”
—http://www.copenhagenize.com/
Digital, Intelligent, Smart Cities: Ten years books →
urenio.org
This collection of books from 2000 to 2010 examines the role and contribution of information technologies, the Internet, innovation ecosystems and institutions to the making of the 21st century cities.
Books are presented by chronological order of publication and summaries are by the authors or publishers.
“If people do not have a direct bodily or kinesthetic relation to their city they will never develop responsibility. The sustainable city is not so much about the ‘hardware’ of the city but the very behavior of the city and how people treat the city. The sustainable city is about behavior and about creating a simple set of rules that educate people to act and behave in a sustainable way.”
—Thomas Sieverts in an interview to Sustainable Cities
social infrastructure
our cities are so congested, specifically in asia. we do not have proper social infrastructure, it means we do not have enough school, hospital, multiplex, shopping complex, parks in our cities. which is the basic need of a city. these places need big land. it is very hard to get big land at a single place.
if we will not reform that situation then there will houses everywhere and social infrastructure of cities will be more weak. if we protect the vacant place and outside aera of city for these social purposes then not only the present people but also the people who live after that reserved area will benefit.
automatic email and phone call on the vent of fire
A device should be developed which will detect fire and will send a phone call and email to fire brigade, central monitoring system(a city call center for managing automatic fires and theft call), neighbors, mobiles of special recipients, personal security etc.
Cities in 2035 →
citybreaths.tumblr.com
“Cities will be too big and complex for any single power to understand and manage them. They already are, in fact. The word “city” will lose some of its meaning: it will make less and less sense to describe agglomerations of tens of millions of people as if they were one place, with one identity….
